


Parrhesia

by filia_noctis



Category: Alexander Trilogy - Mary Renault
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-17
Updated: 2014-12-17
Packaged: 2018-03-01 22:35:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2790176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/filia_noctis/pseuds/filia_noctis





	Parrhesia

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fawatson](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fawatson/gifts).



There is generally a lot more rigidity in the ritual. And generally it doesn’t take a decade, or so people imagine.

In Thargelia they are stoned to death. In Colophon, they are whipped and burnt and have their ashes scattered at sea. To bear the mark of the people’s taint always on their innocence. To be the ritually ugly face, the token icon of all the pollution. All the sin. The pollution slathered like honey on the coarse banal disposability of their existence. For exile, for death. For purging the community’s sins and bearing the baggage of ill-luck. On the body. To ease minds and rest consciences and add security. And perish and get gobbled up by the people who need saving. The pharmakos. The human scape-goat.

 

He stays awake the night before, thinking of nothing in particular.

The morning sees him garbed and fed and armoured in immaculate indifference. But just as the hour spells ‘now’ he is seized by a scalding fever to return once more to his desk, to touch, where once he would only surround himself with and see, the soft ridge of his favoured stylus; the once-coveted volume on tracking and the hunt that he had stolen from his father’s library when he was ten, to be punished within an inch of his skin, and gifted when he was thirteen; the fur draped over his seat, the warm smell and touch of his wife’s fingers on them that have never chilled; relics of friendships and places and campaigns, and his daimon has evaded him in endured, hollow time and crystallized around him.

And later, after the blade has sliced through Philip’s sternum in an alien familiarity—Philip stabbed is an aberration despite the many wounds and many deaths his hands have wrought: does the blade really crunch and shiver for a beat?—he is, in some sense, giving back: the burden of the soiled and leaden years behind him are pooling out from the knots in his shoulders, the sweat on his brow, the lines of his mouth, and meeting Philip still in the embrace Pausanias has clasped his king and lover in. he can feel the tremors of them as they reach the king, the blackened, bloodied knowledge of the spreading red wet the body he has once loved and oft guarded in the stretch of one tardy moment, and he is already, already running out of time, and between them, Philip remains the luckier one—always will—and gets to have a lover’s embrace to perish in. Pausanias doesn’t have the luxury of much beyond banal endurance and his moment is gone. He will think of death another day and outlive the one at hand. He debates leaving the knife in.

 

Once upon a time, Oedipus the king had exiled Oedipus the man for the taint he was sure he had escaped, to unknowingly bear, for the sake of a stranger-father who deserved patricide. And his diseased city was saved, again, for a time. But kings are strange and Oedipus strange and accounts of him, of them, stranger. Homer said he lived and ruled.

When a village has drought; crops fail; lambs die; children die: in the bigger places in the plains, villages pretending to be cities might send for a philosopher or ask an oracle. In the back-country, where he was born and raised and wed, the peasants in their sheepskin cloaks went up by narrow paths to ask some priestess who worshipped dread Hekate right alongside any other god, made nothing of sacrificing at new moon at the crossroads, had midwived every birth in the village and keened at every death. They’d sit in her hut that always smelled of new thatch, and draw up lives in their minds to see who could be spared, thrown away with the village’s ill-luck, sent to wander the wilderness, die.

And if the one thrown out eases the hearts of the village in the wake of his exile, his life forfeit even if his existence isn’t, it only proves they have chosen well.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Foster-child of Silence and Slow Time](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2781362) by [toujours_nigel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel)




End file.
